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Strategies & Market Trends : Roger's 1998 Short Picks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Pancho Villa who wrote (4879)	3/12/1998 11:10:00 PM
From: Joey Two-Cents	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 18691

Japan's economy is in a death spiral with it's government riddled with corruption and scandal. This spiral is being amplified by Japan's inability to compete with its devalued neighbors (40% of their exports go to these countries). If they devalue it would have a worse effect than China on the other Asian nations. All the FOREX derivatives tying the US$ and the Japanese Yen would be toasted. Look what happened after Korea, the 11th largest country devalued. Now multiply that by 25 times. Japan last year stated "We will not be the scapegoat for a world-wide depression; it will not start here". China has stated "We will not devalue ever." Yet China and Japan are both losing tremendous export business because they can't compete with the remains of the Asia nations. Other than their US$ bonds, they have nothing left. The biggest threat to the US banking system is the unwinding of FOREX derivatives. Already we've had mergers of USB/UBS, Deutche/Morgan Grenfeld, JP Morgan is looking for someone to merge with. Chase has at least $ 1.5B in derivative losses. I purchased some CMB 80 puts of 1/00 and plan to buy some CCI puts tomorrow. biz.yahoo.com biz.yahoo.com biz.yahoo.com biz.yahoo.com dailynews.yahoo.com inancial_news/koreachina_1.html biz.yahoo.com biz.yahoo.com news.bbc.co.uk:80/hi/english/business/newsid_64000/64526.stm kitcomm.com And on a lighter note, heres a good link for a lot of good information. cob.calpoly.edu

To: Pancho Villa who wrote (4879)	3/13/1998 7:13:00 AM
From: Marconi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18691

Hello Mr. Villa: I thought French and Fama at the U of Chicago a number of years ago--perhaps 10, found that beta was an artifact of the traditional way of selecting companies to obtain beta statistics--generally starting by breaking the randomly selected firms into groupings according to sizes. Beta is so popularly used though, that anyone not using it had better understand and be able to explain well the reasons why not. The concept is appealing. but for fund managers, it is no way to run a fund. I do not use beta's to much of an extent in my judgment. They might count as 10% impact on a decision. I think looking at charts to relate them to events and how people seem to be behaving--the prevailing economics of the situation (people behavior = economics) mean much more, as well as some idea of the merits of the business entity relative to competitors and alternatives, or emerging developments in some cases. Best regards, mdr